Excavation Point Number GC121
by MarisolM
Summary: A young anthropologist and her crew are on the brink of uncovering the legendary Cave of Two Lovers in northern China, but instead stumble into a secret tomb. The tomb of Fire Lord Zuko and his wife...
1. Excavation Point

"Dr. Chen, you _gotta_ come see this. I think I found--"

"Syl, I swear," the petite woman didn't bother turning her head into the dark tunnel, "you give me another April Fools today... and I'm _throwing my helmet at you_!"

They had been chiseling through inches of rock along this new excavation point, and the young anthropologist had just about called it quits with the day.

"No -- seriously, Grace, _I'm not joking._" the man moved some of his long, messy brown hair to press his ear further against the concave rocks. _"_There's something behind this wall. It feels _hollow._"

Grace came over with her thin lips pursed even more in speculation, holding her burrower's helmet tightly as she adjusted the light towards Syl. If it hadn't been for the bit of soft dirt and dust covering her face and the forest-green cargo pants, she could've passed as a very distraught librarian looking for a missing book. When she pressed her ear against the same spot, and heard a distant echo... her eyes bolted.

Syl caught that contagious smile, immediately calling to their geologist a few yards off in the dim light.

"Andrea, get over here! We need shovels!"

A tall, plump woman with curly black hair scurried into the scene, staying careful to watch her step in the darkness. It didn't take long for the three of them to jam their shovels straight into the rocks, picking up pieces of gravel out of the wall before an opening crumbled into existence.

"Hoooooly cr--" Andrea's mouth fell.

Syl immediately took out his flashlight to look into the hole. "You think this might be it?"

"I'm not sure." Grace didn't hesitate to place her hands inside the opening to examine further. "According to legend, the Cave of the Two Lovers was aligned with magnesium pyrite: _Glow-in-the-Dark_ crystal, remember?

"Yeah, but those things would've burnt out _ages _ago," Andrea located her small notepad at a pocket inside her brown-leather coat. "Nobody's found this place in centuries, Grace, and with nothin' but darkness... those crystals would've given themselves out, eventually."

"She has a point," Syl managed.

"I suppose you're right." Grace squinted her eyes, examining the lining of the rocks and gave a small sigh. "Man... I thought this was going to be different."

"Different? What're you talking about?" Syl couldn't help but laugh a little. "_We might've found the famous Cave of Two Lovers!"_

"Yeah," Grace wiped some of the dirt from her goggles with her free arm, "but I guess I was expecting a more... _dramatic discovery, _you know? With the ancient markings of the Badger Moles along the walls, the green-lit crystals making a path into the Lovers' tombs... this just looks like another dark, dirty tunnel to me!"

Andrea and Syl made matching odd looks at the woman, whose goggles were somewhat lopsided in the moment.

"What?" the woman stared at them incredulously. "You don't understand... I've been imagining this since I was a _little girl_. It would've been nice to have _something _match the real thing!"

"Well hey," Syl jabbed his research partner on the shoulder, "we haven't even gotten to the _good_ part yet! Maybe the actual tomb'll make up for some of those lost dreams of yours, Gracey."

Dr. Chen blocked his next playful jab, keeping her professional-looking stature as she took another breath into the dark cavern ahead of them.

"You want me to gather the troops?" Andrea smirked.

"Yes." Grace felt her bold voice coming back to her as she turned on her flashlight into the tunnel. "Tell Dr. Dragon we're heading east into the southwestern brink, approximate coordinates:_ thirty-two by fifty-four_. Tell him to keep his microphone on, and get the interns ready for some serious digging. And get us some extra batteries, please."

Dr. Chen smiled at the last statement, by which her friend then threw her a teasing grunt. She despised being the dubbed the 'waitress' of this whole operation, but aside from being the crew's expert Geo-chronologist, Andrea had to admit she did a_ hell _of a good job.

"I'll get you your camcorder, too, Syl." Andrea then said in a light-hearted manner, rearranging the goggles over her eyes as she scavenged out of the dark realm, leaving Grace and Syl to take a couple of moments to look at each other, and then to the dark tunnel in front of them.

The two couldn't help but squeal happily, like two children about to enter Disney World.

Three years.

To Grace Chen, those past three years had been nothing but a maelstrom of disappointment, delusion, and mostly downright ridicule about this entire excavation to find the legendary _Tomb of OmaShu _along the vast mountainous regions of her ancestors' homelands near Beijing, China.'The Cave of Two Lovers' she mused to herself, wondering if such a thing was indeed possible to exist: a cavern that withheld evidence that love - true love - did exist, and it was unquestionably worth fighting for.

No, Grace didn't consider herself a believer. She had actually given up on the search for true love the day she turned thirty, closing that chapter in her life about finding the perfect man, and instead dedicated her self to love what she _did_. And what Grace loved... was stories, and dirt. Perhaps if there was anyone who deserved the credit in unfolding her future it was her grandmother for telling her all those stories about the old world, about the city _OmaShu_ that had been constructed out of true love. She wasn't a girl to believe in anything too sentimental, but prided herself in slivers of hope in the form of research grants and generous donations by her fellow Stanford friends... including Sylvester Matsko.

Funny, how before this whole '_search for OmaShu' _fiasco began, Syl had been quite happy living under his graduate assistantship at UCLA, teaching intermediate Mandarin to sleepy undergrads in the daytime, showing off his skill of the language to pretty blue-eyed girls on the occasional night outings. It was during one afternoon at a coffee shop as he was writing his Master's thesis: "Strategic War Planning that Brought the Fire Nation out of the mainland Earth Kingdom during the Brykean Dynasty of Imperial China," when he stumbled upon a familiar face on the front page of the school newspaper:

_**Stanford graduate, Grace Sheng-Ting Chen, from Pal**_**o **_**Alto, CA, becomes the youngest in university history to receive the Honorary Doctoral Degree in Chinese Anthropology. Dr. Chen now seeks small crew for long-term excavation in northern Beijing, China to find legendary tomb**__**highlighted in her doctoral thesis, funded by the Stanford University Department of East Asian Cultures.**_

When Syl read about her needing a professional translator and analyst of the military history prior to the Brykean Era, he almost spit out his coffee in excitement.

The rest was history.

Little by little, Grace managed to reconnect with her former classmate, remembering how oftentimes they would doodle ugly pictures of their cultural anthropology professors whenever lectures would drag. By the time she recruited geologist Dr. Andrea Linx, archaeologist Dr. Michel Dragon, and her first group of undergrad interns under a six-month paid contract, Grace's enthusiasm for this little expedition to China was slowly dwindling by budget cuts and the many defensive arguments she had to make in front of the university board for extra time on location.

She'd argued her way into three years, and Grace knew the board would not give them much more time.

Sometimes she snuggled into her blankets for warmth during those cruel winters in northern Beijing, and she would curse herself stupid for turning down that teaching position at the_ Institute for East Asian Civilizations _back in sunny California. But Grace Chen knew she had to find this legendary place at some point, and with every small artifact she and Syl discovered with their small research crew... it made Grace hopeful that they were getting closer.

Either that, or she had quite the list of I.O.U.s to make by the time she returned home.

"Michel, can you hear me?" Grace pressed on the tiny microphone attached to her jacket. A bit of static came as a response, along with a muffled voice with a slight French accent.

"Yea, Doctor," came the microphone speaker against Grace's left ear. "You're fine, I'm checking the coordinates on the computer... according to the vibration readings, that tunnel goes a few yards below ground. Make sure the rope link is tight, yes?"

"Roger that, Dragon," Grace laughed, keeping her footing strong as she carefully continued downward into the tunnel. The rope was latched in her belt, and it was attached to Syl's belt a few feet above her, and it led out of the tunnel into the crew's station, where Andrea and others kept a safe grip the whole time.

"You got the camera rolling, Syl?" Grace coughed out a bit of dust as she made her way down the narrow tunnel.

"Yep, but I dunno what good it's gonna do with all this dust," Syl remarked, trying to hold it steady in one hand as he crouched a few steps behind.

Syl was right. Their flashlights could barely cut through the dust as they tried to find some sort of opening, but Grace was determined to continue documenting every detail of this secret tunnel She grabbed the portable tape recorder from her pocket, rewinded some of the tape and quickly pressed it on.

"_This is Dr. Grace Chen... April first, two thousand and nine... inside Excavation Point number G-C-121 for the OmaShu Project."_

A single rope was the only link between Grace and Syl as they scavenged that dark and narrow pathway, with all that equipment they clung onto, they prayed that the rope would be strong enoughlead them further into the abyss... with Dr. Dragon hanging onto every word through their digital microphones. Grace started to cough, then.

"_There -- is -- as you can imagine by my coughing just now_... _quite a bit of rubble in this small tunnel that my assistant Mr. Matsko discovered_ _shortly. It's hard to make out any sort of marks along the walls... OmaShu's tomb was said to be hidden within a labyrinth of tunnels guided by magnesium pyrite, but--"_

"GRACE!"

Syl's camera had fidgeted against focus as he squinted his eyes to find certain markings on the rocks with his helmet light, and the woman almost slipped down the rocky slope as she looked up in reaction. She paused the tape recorder.

"What the _hell_, Syl?" she whispered angrilly.

Syl was excitedly pointing on some odd markings with his hand for the camera. "Grace, look, these are ancient _burn_ marks. I think we found a secret burial ground of the ancient Fire Nation."

Grace almost choked in her own saliva with disbelief, pausing so much that Dr. Dragon had to call out on it through her microphone.

_Impossible,_ she thought. If what Sylvester said was true, this meant that this _entire _mountain range... roughly a year's worth of research and investigation.... had been for _nothing._

"That's crazy, Syl," she whispered up to him so as to not let the camera catch her words. "Geographically, the Fire Nation was documented to be somewhere in Eastern Korea or Japan, not mainland China!"

"I know; that's not what I meant..." Syl insisted on keeping the camera on, trying to locate the other intricate burn marks along the dark walls. "It's just as probable that people from the Fire Nation could've chosen to be buried in ancient Earth Kingdom territory. By the looks of these markings, it must've been _sooome_ burial ceremony... _hey, Grace_, you think it could've been a Fire Lord?"

That was when Grace had had enough, and she pressed the tape recorder once again.

"_Correction for the record. Excavation point number G-C-121 is clearly not the sacred grounds of OmaShu, by the looks of the burning marks on the walls. At best, this tunnel is leading us to more artifacts from the ancient culture of the Fire Nation... which I will be obliged to document for Dr. Max Kiely, since that covers his line of expertise. This is Dr. Grace Chen, reporting on April first--"_

"Wait, Grace... _what are you doing?_" Syl struggled to turn off his camera and look down at his research partner.

"I don't have time for this, Syl," Grace murmured and was ready to start heading back up the tunnel, but the man was deliberately staying put. "The board wrote to me. They're on my _back _about finding the Cave, and if I don't give them results by the end of April... they're _going to cut my funding._ We can't just investigate every little tunnel we keep stumbling into--"

"Guys, you doing okay? I'm getting an unusual Richter reading up here." Dragon's voice muffled into Grace's ear, and the girl huffed a sigh, grabbing her little mic.

"Yeah... yeah, we're fine," Grace exchanged a scowl with Syl as she said so. "Listen, Michel, false alarm. This place is Kiely's territory. We're heading back up..."

But Grace's voice hung at the end of that syllable, hearing the sudden tremors occur against the palms of her hands as she held onto the tunnel walls. Syl felt them, too, and he took it the same way by his frightened look. A minor quake was passing through the mountain... and Grace immediately grabbed hold of her tool belt to ensure that if worse came to worse, they could attempt to climb out.

It was minor, but it had passed under Grace's feet enough to crumble the ground below her completely, and before either of them could even think about screaming... they slid further down into that dark tunnel with their helmet lights breaking the dusty air. Grace was yelping, holding onto Syl while tried not to laugh as he documented the whole sliding experience with his camera. The whole thing didn't last very long, but it was enough to wake them both out of their spirits, and thanking them that the rope had still been intact to their connections topside.

"_Michel! _Michel, you still there?" Grace tapped into her microphone, while Syl investigated his surroundings like a cautious, curious child with a camera.

"I'm here, Grace," the man replied reassuringly. "What's going on? Where are you?"

"The rocks gave in, Mich," she explained breathlessly, coughing. "Syl and I must've slipped way below ground. I'm not sure where we are..."

Her helmet's light was going wildly from one corner of the place to another, her eyes slowly adjusting to the small circular pit of dust she and Syl had stumbled into. She placed a sleeve over her mouth to control the coughing, rolling her eyes as Syl kept toying around the walls with his camcorder light.

"Do you still want me to pull you both up?" came Michel's voice again, but just as it did... Grace's helmet light had noticed a strange set of blocks in the faint distance on the pit. Two blocks... two coffins, exactly like the ones illustrated to hold the bodies of Oma and Shu.

Goosebumps had raced onto Grace's skin, she could hardly breathe. "Give us a few more minutes, Michel. I think we may have found something. _SYL, THIS WAY!"_

Syl located the woman through his camera's night-vision light, watching her excitingly gesture over to a shadowy place in the pit they had landed on.

"This... this isn't the _OmaShu _tomb, Grace. Oh god.... _Oh my god...!_"

"Are you sure? What... Syl, what is it!?"

"Grace... _we found the burial place of Fire Lord Zuko_. FIRE LORD ZUKO!"

"Who?" her voice sounded abundantly disappointed.

Syl stared at his friend with bulging, incredulous eyes.

"You're kidding me... Grace, this is as big as King Arthur... no... _KING TUT!_" Syl was moving his camera so wildly along the written marks on Zuko's tomb, he didn't notice. "Do you have _any idea _what this man did for the Fire Nation, all the prosperity be brought back to it after Sozin's War? The kid was a genius!"

"Oh yeah... I remember that story," the woman brushed through the handful of facts she could remember from studying the Brykean Dynasty, feeling awfully guilty that it wasn't her most favorite time period in ancient Chinese history. "Didn't the legend say he was in league with the forty-seventh Avatar... Avatar Aang... and they helped rebuild the world or something?"

The man felt insult pounding on his chest, realizing how single-minded Dr. Chen had become throughout this entire excavation for the Cave of Two Lovers. He wanted to say something, but he knew she was just being stubborn, and hiding her inner disappointment of losing another day of funding for this cave.

"Yeah," Syl pressed his had onto the tomb gently with his free hand, blowing into the dust to locate any written accounts of the burial ceremony. "And according to the Brykean records, Avatar Aang was the last Avatar to exist before the Age of Bending completely disappeared."

Grace snorted, examining the other tomb. "I honestly don't understand how people could take the '_Age of Bending_' so legitimately as historical fact. "

Syl glared up at her. "Hey, it _did _happen."

"I know, but that's almost as to say we should take every one of Jesus's _miracles_ from the Bible as historical fact. In the end, they're nothing but eyewitness accounts, and we can only take so much of those things seriously."

"Grace, you're slapping ten years of high quality education to your face right now," Syl promptly turned the camcorder over to her, as she stared at him annoyingly from the other block. "I honestly think you'd be a much happier person if you quit thinking about the money you're losing, and just start believing in true love... like _these people did."_

Grace muttered a "Shut up" at the camera as she blew dust off of the second tomb. "Oh man... _this must be his wife's tomb..._ the Fire Lady Katara, right_?_"

"Yep. The famous peasant girl from the Southern Water Tribe. Interesting story there..." Syl could feel his insides becoming heavier with sentimental thoughts as he kept focusing his camera to the dusty blocks. "... it was a romance built out of friendship. You couldn't imagine how those two hated each other, but when they became friends... _everything _changed."

"Okay, Syl, I get it!" The woman grunted again, trying to read the inscriptions on her own as she adjusted her goggles for a better view. "They were in love."

The man lowered his camera to gather himself closer to the first coffin and read some of the inscriptions on Fire Lord Zuko's tomb, feeling altogether lucky and living someone else's life for this sort of opportunity. As he traced the Chinese writing along the base of the tomb... something else caught his eye at the corner of the second coffin.

Something that gilded against the light of his camera.

Crouching near the tomb, Syl turned on his camera and moved himself towards the shining object... what looked like a small bead covered with dust. When Grace stared over at him, she raised a brow and looked in the same direction. Something was resting at the base of Fire Lady Katara's tomb in this dark, secret burial pit.

And covered in layers of delicate dust, curled up in a sleeping fetal position for what must've been thousands of years... completely eaten away by the tiny creatures of the mountain, laid the skeleton of a man. Grace could not place who it was, but Syl caught the identity immediately with his camera.

"The beaded necklace."

It was the same necklace they'd both admired, many years ago when they were learning about the ancient civilization of the Air Nomads during the Brykean Era, how that culture had been wiped out from the Imperial Fire Nation during Sozin's reign. The necklace stood out to them because it held the iconic orange of the Nomads, with their insignia of Air illustrated in the book as a representation of a lost culture.

The beaded necklace could only have been worn by the last surviving Airbender, and according to the history books and Syl's uncanny fanaticism for this time period... it was Avatar Aang.

"Syl," Grace whispered slowly, her eyes locked on that beaded necklance, "I know the books documented Avatar Aang's alliance with the Fire Lord Zuko ... but do you have any idea if maybe, he was_ also_ really close to...?"

The man placed a sleeve over his mouth as he held the camera shakingly, taken aback by the unceremonious placement of a man who should've been buried in the most sacred of places... and instead found here... willingly left to die next to the coffin of another man's wife.

He nodded his head towards Grace in the dim light, finally turning off his camera to conceal the evidence.

"Grace, forget the Cave of Two Lovers. _I think we may've located the most valuable love triangle in the history of the ancient world..._"

* * *

**A/N - Hey guys. So to further prove my love for Avatar, I'm experimenting with a new miniseries here, dealing with stuff happening after the War. I'm not even sure how far I want to go with it, but I think it'll be interesting. =) Love triangles can have quite the complex stories. Let me know if you like it so far. --MM**


	2. Artifact A01, the Medallion

"Sir, I know it sounds crazy, but you have to believe me. This is _huge!_"

Grace was pacing back and forth outside of the tight-knit clump of tarp tents outside their excavating location on the mountains. The sun had set minutes ago and the temperature had dropped significantly, but the young woman was determined to end this conversation well. Keeping one hand over her ear to prevent the gushing wind from breaking any connection, she babbled on into her cell phone, hoping that her sleep-deprived supervisor all the way in California could understand what his funding had found.

"I– I understand that we initially requested the grant in pursuit of OmaShu... but I'm asking you to give us permission to further investigate the artifacts within Dr. Kiely's – – sir?"

Grace shook the cell phone, the reception clearly not working in her favor. The man's voice came in muffled sounds, but she sadly caught the words 'shouldn't' and 'expertise' and 'suspension of project.'

Her voice began to quiver over the phone.

"Sir... Dr. Kiely is not scheduled to finish his documentary in India for another twelve days. _Please. _ If I promised you that Excavation Point G-C-121 would be a great asset to my research for OmaShu, would you give me those twelve days? I'll even send you j-pegs so I can prove to you that it isn't a lost cause. _Twelve days._ That's all we need."

Another bit of that murmuring, sleepy voice came from the other end of her call, and Grace held her breath the entire time. It soon came that she was nodding her head in response, with a smile in her eyes and with absolute agreement.

"Yes. Yes, Doctor, I understand. And I'll forward everything to Kiely as usual." Grace nodded again, laughing. "If we don't find anything, I'm buying you dinner at Saint Micheal's the moment I land in California. Yes, thank you Good night, sir."

She triumphantly flipped the phone closed. Once again, Grace Chen felt like the universe was merciful, letting her arm drop back to her side. She promptly looked over to the tents that limply held themselves against the spring winds of the northern Beijing mountains. Inserting the phone back into her cargo pants' pockets, Grace hiked back down to the small clump of tents to rejoin her crew with the update.

Michel was too busy re-wiring one of his computers to get a higher-definition image of Syl's footage from within the caves, reading the coordinates of each piece as the sepia-toned screens on his handful of laptops zoomed in and out like a visual orchestra. Grace passed his dim tent in a smile, saying "keep working, Dragon. I've given us twelve days here."

Syl and Andrea and a handful of the interns were not wasting any time inside their residential lab - a small trailer with so many open compartments, it looked like the exoskeleton of a giant beige-colored insect. Thanks to Syl's brilliance and his inexplicable flare for multi-pocketed cargo pants, he and Grace had managed to zip-lock bag a few of the hand-sized bits of rubble back from the discovered tomb. The interns were practically salivating over each of the pieces Andrea assigned to them in their stations, cleaning them lightly with horse-tail brushes and rinsing them on individual pans delicately with ethyl alcohol drawn from a dental rinsing hose. To Grace, the half-dozen interns looked like kindergartners poking into dead insects, their curiosity beaming with every peep of the microscope.

"You B-S-ed him again, didn't you," muttered Syl just as Grace approached his work station at the very end of the lab.

The girl snorted and looked elsewhere, then crossed her arms in defeat. "It got us twelve days."

"That's my girl," Syl said proudly while Grace muttered a 'shut up' back to him.

"I figured since we're nowhere near finding OmaShu by this point, we might as well finish off our excavation with a bang," Grace then said disheartened. "Who knows? Maybe by the time Kiely gets here, we'll find more evidence to back up another research initiative for the Cave of Two Lovers once I get back to California."

Syl started twisting one of the lens a bit tighter. "According to the written accounts, Avatar Aang stumbled into that underground cave with Katara and her brother and some nomadic hippie minstrels back in the day when they were fleeing the Fire Nation."

"Ugh... not that love triangle cheese-fest again..."

"This was waaaay before it actually happened, thank you." Syl held his voice boldly. "Don't you remember Kadel's pop quiz back in '99? Avatar Aang and Katara fell into the Cave of Two Lovers. Zuko was kind of MIA at the time, being on the run from his crazy sister - but the point is... nobody could blame those two from having a thing for each other after coming out of the OmaShu tomb. The inscription in the tomb even inspired it: Love is brightest in the Dark."

"That wasn't a metaphor, Syl; it was a _riddle_ they just happened to solve correctly." Grace threw back at him, cheeky. "And it was a trick question Kadel put on the quiz, genius."

"Yeah, but it just goes to show... sometimes _believing_ in something is enough to get people to move forward."

"Whatever you say, loverboy," Grace teased, punching her friend on the shoulder to give her some space in his research station. "But I have a pretty good feeling this tomb of Fire Lord Zuko was hidden in the Earth Kingdom for good reason, and we just need to figure out why."

"You just want that big fat check from headquarters, don'cha," Syl didn't even bother to look at Grace as he muttered it bluntly.

"_Hey, _that's not fair." Grace shot back at him with bite, sitting herself down at the nearest stool. "I worked too damned hard to find the Cave of Two Lovers, Syl, and we both know it's near one of these mountains. Kiely may have dibs on G-C-121, since technically it houses a Fire Nation monarchy, but my theory is that The Cave of Two Lovers somehow inspired that couple."

"You mean, the love triangle." Syl pointed out.

"Right, whatever," Grace lowered her eyelids. "I have a feeling that cave has spiritual aura of some sort that brought Fire Lord Zuko and Katara to be buried there without realizing its significance. Avatar Aang - being from the Spirit World and all - he may've found a way to track them down on his dying days and romantically chosen to stay there. This could be _ground-breaking_ for my book!"

Syl took out a scissor-protractor from the side-drawer next to his stool, and worked on the measurements of Avatar Aang's necklace quietly, swallowing his harsh criticism on Grace. He hated the fact that she was brushing over this wonderful love story so lightly, looking over mere facts as if these people were already half-dead as they'd been living in the Golden Age of Bending.

Syl never understood why it had been lost, just as Biblical miracles had been lost or the ancient workings of Buddha had been left behind. He wanted to assume this Age of Bending had been nothing more than folklore between the pages of his history books, but being the all-around romantic, Sylvester Matsko knew there must've been something else, there.

"I still can't believe you didn't let me grab that necklace," Syl then sulked like a little boy, as Grace readjusted the lens on another set of magnifying glasses.

"You mean Artifact A-01? That skeleton would've crumbled, Syl, you know that," she rolled her eyes, now looking into the intricate detail of the photograph her partner was analyzing. "Besides, you seem to be getting quite a good read of the thing right here. Kiely would yell at us if we touched it."

"Since when do you take orders from Kiely?" Syl made a sly smile at Grace as he took out a pencil from one of his pockets.

"Look, I may not like the guy," Grace scoffed in her own defense, "but considering he's the head archaeologist of the Fire Nation's Brykean era right now, we need to pay his respects. His findings might actually take our research into the Earth Kingdom somewhere. And if we kiss his butt enough... he might support our cause on finding The Cave once we get back to California."

"Touche, boss," Syl laughed, almost amused at how his research partner was slowly turning into the Dark side of archeological digging. It certainly took her long enough.

"So what does it say?" Grace then asked, putting on her lens helmet and writing 'Artifact A-01' on a small notepad she took from her coat pocket.

The image was a zoomed-in result of Avatar Aang's central medallion on the necklace, by which the three swirls of the Air symbol seemed to be intricately marked by minuscule Chinese kanji characters... all hand-written.

Syl followed along the swirl markings on the image with his hand, deciphering the tiny characters word-for-word as he did so.

_"As a remembrance to the loved ones I left behind... This medallion is my first step towards a new beginning... To prove our traditions shall never be lost as I dedicate my life to the World."_

Grace blinked, confused for the moment as she looked up from the table.

"Are you _sure_ that's what it says?" Grace rose a questioning brow. "The books described Air-Temple medallions as holding ancient, poetic messages about the spirit world. That inscription doesn't sound authentic at all. It sounds fake!"

Syl just gulped, showing a sense of fluster as he kept his eyes on the table. "Oh, it's authentic all right," he said softly. "Actually... it's one-of-a-kind."

Grace stared at her research partner, perplexed, and Syl continued in absolute astonishment.

_"Avatar Aang made this medallion himself."_

* * *

Thousands of years earlier, the Earth Kingdom saw daylight over the walls of Ba Sing Se, as if the people had forgotten what it was like to be outside for the sunrise. Shades of deep maroon and auburn began to unfold across the blanket of thin cloud, and children in both ragged and silk clothes played outside their homes... chasing each other for games of tag with the abandoned Fire Nation tanks that had been left behind.

The tankmen had retreated outside the walls days ago, some of them resisting arrest and taken into the underground prisons for further questioning. Trials had been made by the re-established Council of Four, and the bold King Bumi led the city for the time-being, seeing to it that these Fire Nation soldiers would meet their consequences as the days passed. That sunrise, however, he snorted his way out into the Earth King's courtyards... where as planned... he would meet his childhood friend for another lesson on Earthbending.

Funny... how in spite of the boy's recent victory over the Fire Lord and his restoration of peace over a hundred-year long war... there were still many arts he had to learn.

Apparently, one of them involved bead-making.

"Remember the time you said you wanted to get into the jewelry business?"

Aang laughed, hearing the limping sound of Sokka's crutch come in from one of the corners of the courtyard, as the boy meditated in a sitting position to wait for his former master to arrive.

The Fire Lord was long gone... taken back to his homelands by order of the new Avatar and with absolute support from the Order of the White Lotus... and yet Aang still felt like such a boy as he looked over his shoulder to Sokka.

"I brought you some nuts, buddy." Sokka then tossed him a small paper bag. "You need to eat more if you wanna get this thing started right."

Aang caught the bag effortlessly, laughing again but still saying nothing. A deep orange sunrise was all over the sky, then, and Momo had been chasing the native birds around the open courtyard to let the time pass. He could tell by Momo's restlessness that early in the morning that being without Appa just didn't feel the same, like a piece of that little creature's mind felt lost. Aang felt it too.

As much as he felt proud about what he had done those last few days, something was missing from him. He looked up at the sky, waiting to find any sign of a giant bison soaring through the clouds... any sign that the Fire Nation would have the young, rightful man to their throne... and his ears waited patiently, for the sound of the lovely waterbender's voice welcoming his name with open arms.

"You think they'll make it back safely?"

It had been three days, and they still had not returned from the Fire Nation palace.

"The Fire Sages sent us the message yesterday; Zuko won! He's probably filling out the necessary paperwork now, or something," Sokka coughed, feeling his voice crack embarrassingly. "I mean okay... I have a feeling Zuko may've gotten the daylights kicked out of him, so Katara's nursing him back on his feet They'll make it back for this."

The boy closed his eyes, smiling at how that girl's maternal instincts never seemed to take a break from anything. He knew it was stupid to think about them..._ together... _as they had never shared a conversation without cynicism, and that Ember Island play exhausted that idea to the point of utter ridicule.

Aang never questioned his instincts, since usually he would know when Katara would be in any sort of danger, but it was difficult then not to think about her. Not to be able to tell her in person that he had defeated the Fire Lord... and that... maybe... that would be enough for to stop being confused. For her to not be afraid of a war, or anything that could possibly get in the way of saying how she really felt for him, once and for all.

The Avatar presented himself strong those last few days... but deep down, he still felt like such a boy with his heart dangling from a thread. Sokka could see that. Toph noticed it, too, but chose to take a break from her brash thoughts on love for the sake of helping a friend through this.

"You're right," Aang said quietly, smiling to the sky and getting up. "If I wanna be a great jewelry-maker, I need to focus."

He untied the bag of nuts and took the liberty of tossing one to Sokka, watching as the lanky boy cracked it on the ground with the base of his crutch. They laughed, noticing how the sounds of birds were now orchestrating themselves to the morning sunlight. It wasn't long before Toph and Bumi joined the boys out in the Earth Kingdom courtyard, laughing and snorting as they kicked gravel out of the way.

"Pian Dao!" Sokka limpy turned, and noticed his former master and White Lotus member straggling behind the others towards the courtyard. "Why are you--"

"Jewelry-making is just as much a martial art as it is a skill, kids." The middle-aged man explained in his philosophical voice. "Bumi invited me to come along."

"Ready for to learn the complexities of clay, glass, and crystal-Bending, boy?" Bumi jumped in and punched Aang playfully on the shoulder.

Aang laughed nervously, not hesitating to give him another hug.

"Wait a second... Bending?" Sokka then interrupted, a bit of disappointment brewing in his eyes as he turned at Pian Dao. "I thought this jewelry-making workshop was gonna be... um, Non-bending "

"No, idiot," Toph snorted. "Why would Aang want to learn to make beads the old-fashioned way if he can easily blow glass and sculpt clay double time? I'm here to teach him about the coolness of metal-molding."

Pian Dao and Bumi rose curious eyebrows at Sokka, who despite the growing facial hair looked suddenly like a disheartened five-year-old.

"But I..." Sokka poked at his crutch on the ground in different places. "I was hoping I could learn a lesson, or two... on carving mechanisms..."

Toph snorted almost too loudly for her own good. "Since when did _you_ get so interested in _jewelry?_"

Interestingly enough, Aang caught the young warrior's hesitation to explain further, remembering a certain girl's necklace... and the fact that Suki had gone off the day before to gather the imprisoned Kyoshi warriors from the island colonies of the Fire Nation. The boy smirked.

"Sokka _loves_ jewelry!" Aang pointed out in meek amusement. "We were actually just talking about putting together a jewelry business... after, um... we got the Earth Kingdom back up and running again."

"Really?" Bumi pursed his wrinkled lips, looking down at Toph as if to get some sort of confirmation. The little girl shook the bangs over her eyes.

"Don't look at me; I'm more manly than those two combined in a sandwich."

"Alright," Pian Dao sighed, gathering the scrolls that were laying on one of the courtyard's benches, "well I suppose we can change our lesson plans to suit Sokka's needs as well. What do you think, sir?"

Bumi made a muffled 'meh' sound and began to EarthBend the courtyard into a rumble, ignoring the yelping sounds Sokka was making from his injured leg. He opened a small pit into the courtyard, deep enough for the small group of kids to be hip-deep from the surface.

"Lesson number one in bead-making... only the _deepest core_ of the rock will make the smoothest beads. Aang, I need you to Bend a dozen fist fulls of the rock below your feet and hover it over to the basket topside. Toph, show the kid how it's done."

"Right, Captain!" The little girl shouted enthusiastically, promptly digging her hands onto the hard rock as if it were as soft as sand... and threw pieces over the pit... just _barely_ missing Sokka's head a few times.

"Here, Sokka, you can chisel some of that rock out yourself," Piandao handed him a silver sharp chisel point and a hammer, taking a pair for himself to demonstrate to the boy.

Aang concentrated fully, biting his tongue at times to bring out a solid fist full of stone from the deep ground, realizing how the deeper the rock was derived... the more stubborn its element would be. As he felt the sweat drip from his eyes, he imagined certain designs he would need to re-create as an Avatar of the Air Temples.

It was the reason to why Bumi insisted he learn this craft before anything further, as it would help the boy bring back his own customs and realize that he couldn't move forward without looking back at what he left behind. He visualized the medallion that Monk Gyatso had always worn at the Southern Temple, how the old man wore it so proudly from dawn until dusk, as the first assignment he had been given the moment he had become a councillor to the Temple.

Each medallion was unique... chiseled, carved and polished by the same person who wore it... which was why Aang had utterly refused to follow Sokka's suggestion to just wear Monk Gyatso's own necklace. The boy couldn't bear to wear such a commemorative, valuable piece. No... Aang decided that when he had the time... he would give Monk Gyatso the proper burial he deserved, letting the man wear his necklace to the very end.

He also remembered the handful of old sayings that were passed on within each medallion of the Air Temple council, some repeating famous lines from the Spirits, others from the Air-borne Avatars themselves. Aang wondered what his own medallion would say, calculating how much space he would have within each of the three iconic swirls of the Air symbol. He wanted it to be special, to have it bring meaning to everything he had gone through and what his people meant to him now as he would represent them in a new World.  
_  
Perhaps in time, an inscription would come to him._

And as he heard the distant grumbling noise of a flying bison overhead, and the cheerful yelling of his name by a very familiar voice, Aang then remembered another custom to the Airbender's medallion. Aang smiled and let his silver eyes glisten against the morning sun to see the arrival.

_He would ask her, the one who had supported his cause from the very beginning, to place the medallion around his neck._


	3. Document A17, the Insignia

"Lower the opacity a bit from that last image; I think I see some writing..."

Dragon nodded from behind the computer screen, using a pen on his worn Wacom tablet to zoom in. The keyboard from Syl's laptop was practically collecting dust as he read each image that passed to his screen across the other side of their table... like two kids passing notes across their desks. Syl kept scribbling notes on a pad while the images zoomed, feeling his belly swell with pride as his own footage passed the screen in sepia tone.

The moon was slowly floating across the night, and Syl could already hear the chattering dying down in the residential tents outside as he and Dragon continued diligently.

Andrea, her crew and the interns had long given up on a hard day's work, snickering about the latest American celebrity gossip through their imported _People_ subscription with some rounds of strong chai tea to warm themselves. Dr. Chen was nowhere to be found.

Funny, how even with all this excavation excitement put into a petite girl's body, Grace Chen would find a way to make it to sleep by eleven o' clock every night... quiet as a mouse. Syl predicted it from the get-go, remembering how prompt she would be with her study time back when they were Stanford kids. He smiled, recalling a time when she even lectured about the importance of a seven-hour sleep to get a decent grade for some class's final exam.

_Shit; what class was that again? _Syl wondered, laughing inside.

Dragon didn't need to look over his screen to note that smile in Syl's face... smiling.

"When are you going to do something about it?"

Michel couldn't resist the question.

It made Sylvester flinch out of thought, placing his fingers confusingly on the keyboard as if he'd been typing his report all along. "Um... come again?"

Dragon made a grunt - a noise the two of them had perceived as either the need for a midnight snack... or the need to discuss girl-trouble. Sylvester gulped.

"She reminds me of my first wife, you know?" Michel pointed out, pushing his glasses further up his hooked nose with a finger. "She keeps you feeling like you can never do enough to please her…"

"Uh huh," Sylvester easily brought a hand to scratch unshaved chin, clenching his teeth as he focused on the screen, his brows tensing at where this conversation was going.

In the span of three years working together, that topic was bound to be brought up at some point.

"…so you keep working your hardest, waiting for a sort of acknowledgment from her voice. Even a gentle touch of her hand is enough to make you feel like you're on top of the mountains." Michel Dragon's french accent kept on coming.

"_Look,_ we're just friends, okay?" Syl arched his bushy eyebrow over to Michel's space on the other side of the desk, feeling a slight ridiculous chuckle deep in his throat. "Grace– _Dr. Chen_– and I don't really float that boat. Believe me, we tried."

Syl and Dragon were the only two night-owls on this OmaShu expedition, and every night it was a constant battle of who'd be the weak link - the one who'd have to call it quits and head to bed, first. Syl continued pretending to type on his laptop, determined to not let a simple talk about girls keep him from leaving the station.

The images on screen were too wonderful to pass off, anyway.

"If you'd seen how much our friends teased us back at Stanford…" Syl snorted, "Grace was the party-pooper whenever I took her out for fun. We just didn't click, and we knew it. Apparently our friends wanted to think differently...?"

Syl chuckled just thinking about how those nights partying late with Grace at school would always end with her desire to leave early, and him having to walk her home. He smirked at those memories... remembering how their friends' whistling and cooing would always commence.

"So you never loved her?" Michel's eyes stayed glued to the screen, but his smirk widened.

"You kidding me? Of course I do; I love Grace."

The young man knew how a simple pause in his voice could send the wrong message, so he kept talking. Explaining.

"She was one of my best friends and kept me sane all through college, what with our antics. We were really close at one point, but I just think people started putting way too much pressure on us… on this idea for us to be _a couple_, and things just got too... _awkward._"

"But you're back together now," the archaeologist kept wiping off the dust to Syl's thoughts. "There's always room for true love to occur, don't you think?"

"Yeah... I wouldn't count on it, Dragon." Syl smirked, remembering the salty taste of Grace's lips, that night he'd accidentally let her have one-too-many Long Islands after final exams. _He'd never felt more parched for water. _"It's all professional."

"Ah well, to each their own," Michel made another one of his signature smirks before returning to business, enhancing the detail of the Fire Lord's sepia-colored tomb onscreen. "Any sign of writing?"

Syl burrowed his bushy eyebrows in focus, leaning closer to his laptop screen to look at the same image. "I'm trying to make sense of whatever's in the corner of my buddy's tomb here – but I don't think it's an inscription. You think it's a symbol?"

"Let me see..." Michel's serious voice came back into existence, gathering his pen and tablet and refocusing on the same image angle Syl had been preoccupied with. "Ah, I've seen that insignia before. The mark of the _Sea Raven raiders_."

* * *

"What're you two smirking about?"

Sokka's voice cracked as the wholesome pair of silhouettes slowly formed back into Aang and Katara, strolling back into Iroh's tea shop after what seemed only minutes of admiring the Ba Sing Se sunset on the balcony. The others had still been laughing about Iroh's consistent suggestion that Sokka trim him down on his painting, but the boy couldn't help but notice that newfound _glow_ that had taken form into the Avatar's face.

No one could've expected Katara's nervous, musical laugh to come in. "It's a beautiful sunset out there. You should all come look at it with us!"

Aang started to laugh himself, his new Avatar robes practically wrapping him up like a present as he crossed his arms embarrassingly. "Yeah, it's… it's so beautiful."

The waterbender's eyes glimmered inexplicably to her friends, with multiple shades of pink on her cheeks, and yet she could not find the courage to look over at Aang as she stood just inches from him. While Zuko had noticed the girl's change immediately, his face seemingly unchanged, Suki stood behind Sokka's chair, ultimately beaming.

As Sokka searched through the others' faces for some sort of explanation, he saw a dainty grin forming in the old man – the kind of grin he'd seen Pakku get the moment he'd mentioned he was their new grandfather. And Toph, for some odd reason, couldn't stop smirking herself.

_Did he miss something?_

Sokka was beginning to push himself out of the chair, "Okay, seriously… what hap--"

"Come on, tough guy," Suki instantly held him by the arm and helped the boy limp towards the open balcony, practically ignoring his strange glances and attempts to rephrase his question back at Katara. Nobody understood why, but Toph promptly followed suit, and boldly suggested that Zuko and Mai try and catch the last bit of sunshine to ease their sullen moods.

The young Fire Lord felt Toph's Earthbending feet tug him forward on the ground, almost spilling the hot green tea from his hand.

Zuko choked. "But I'm not finished with--"

"Let's _go, _Your Highness," Toph murmured with a grin, with Mai just rolling her eyes and following behind them gracefully and quietly.

Iroh, however, had chosen to stay behind, watching the young Avatar and his newly-found bliss walk back to meet their friends out in the sunset. He could hear them talking about things from the past, hearing them share their mutual experiences of adventure, imprisonment, and near-death as if they had been friends their entire lives.

Momo chirped on the old man's shoulder, and Iroh sighed with certain nostalgia as he sat back down to play his horn.

"When should I tell them, do you think?" He asked over to Momo sincerely in his thick, elderly voice, and the lemur just stared blankly at the man's moving mouth. Iroh laughed, petting the little creature as he sat and began to play the horn once again, watching the falling sunset admirably like a distant moth-fly.

It was the same feeling he sought whenever he managed to reunite with the Order of the White Lotus – friends who had kept so many of the same secrets and fought the same battles to prevent a dreadful Hundred-Year war from accomplishing absolute power. And yet, as Iroh looked over at the boy now… he could already see Avatar Aang making a name for himself in this dynasty, with his young nephew keeping him grounded on the realities that this Fire Nation would give to challenge their authority.

_And Iroh sincerely wished he could be young again, just for that moment on the balcony._

He watched the children laugh together, huddling in their respective boldness, awkwardness, and -- in Mai's behalf - reluctance… and Iroh knew this group would change the world. He could already imagine some of them being at odds with one another, figuring out the best ways to reorganize the government of Ba Sing Se (among many other villages out there) attempting to clean them from underground corruption.

Iroh wished that… somehow… he could close his eyes and let those problems disappear like dust, all for the sake of keeping those children on the balcony happy about the future, and hopeful. Alive.

The man's brows furrowed, remembering those dreadful, inevitable sounds of his son's life being taken in the heat of battle… convinced…_certain_… that it had not been an accidental death of any kind. Iroh had been too preoccupied to ascertain such an idea at the time he invaded Ba Sing Se, but he couldn't dismiss the fact that this city had been corrupted for quite some time. Centuries, in fact. The Dai Li must have known about his son. They _surely_ must have known how such a loss would've crumbled a high-strung Fire Nation general to pieces… making him feel helpless.

_Hopeless._

Iroh watched the children admire the last few bits of deep red and indigo from the sky, wondering when would be the best time for their vacation to end… _and when it would be the time for the Avatar to understand the depths of a painfully-divided world._

* * *

"Really?"

Syl looked at the same insignia questionably.

"You sure…"

"Boy, trust me;" Michel Dragon's accented voice came with a hint of smugness. Dr. Kiely made _certain_ I knew of that insignia during his ice glacier expedition to the South Pole years ago."

It seemed that the insignia was getting larger by the way both men looked at it from their respective screens, and Syl could not help but lean in closer, reaching for his tablet pen to zoom in more on the details. "That's interesting, because according to the Fire Nation tradition, establishing an insignia like that on a royal tomb means one of two things: he gained their respect… or he _overthrew _them."

As far as Syl could remember, that insignia had never appeared in the textbook illustrations that depicted Fire Lord Zuko's tomb. Or perhaps he had somehow brushed over the idea that the _Sea Raven raiders _may have obliged to follow this young Fire Lord's news mission towards a better world, when at first they had been reluctant to do so. It seemed highly probable to Syl: he may have just forgotten about Zuko's connection with the Sea Ravens.

And yet he could not rid himself of the idea, and something… _something_ just didn't click with this insignia.

"Dragon, what do you remember about the operations of _Sea Raven raiders?_" Syl Matsko didn't blink once.

"Let me see..." the older man scratched his unshaved chin, casually moving a thermos from the desk to sip a bit of tea brewed inside. "My last lecture with Dr. Kiely dealt with the historical Fire Nation raids that claimed the south glaciers in Antarctica. According to our findings in the Pole, it seemed that the raids had continued more and more with the progress of the war. They had already made their claim to the land, and yet they _insisted _on coming back over time, taking poor water tribesmen prisoner at will. Dr. Kiely – I remember this clearly – his theory stated that Sozin and his son Azulon were merely taking water-benders hostage in the Fire Nation until they lost _hope _over their powers and couldn't bend anymore… whereas Ozai…"

Syl did not need to guess: "…that guy didn't _have _that much patience, did he?"

"Very true," Dragon confirmed. "Ozai was ready to fully invade the Earth Kingdom by then, and so he broke off the naval military into separate regiments. He specifically gave The Sea Ravens a permanent base near the South Pole, ordering them to kill any waterbenders they found without question. It's why their symbol was a _sea raven – _in folklore, those creatures crept out of the sea and snatched whatever helpless prey they found, devouring it into the water in hordes."

"Hmm," Syl took those images of massacre as best he could, writing down a note and lowering his voice at another thought. "What really bugs me is that this so-called _Sea Raven _insignia is engraved on the very bottom-left corner of his tomb. This means that, hypothetically, it was the first group of people Fire Lord Zuko had to _deal _with during his reign period, and either it ended in a compromise in the Fire Lord's favor… or… he… got _rid of them._"

"Improbable," the archeologist looked over to his partner in a skeptical look. "Fire Lord Zuko would _never _have followed his father's steps and massacred people – I don't recall any public documents depicting the young man in that nature."

Syl could feel goose bumps sprouting behind his neck already. "Maybe that's because… maybe only a few select people knew about this _thing_ he'd done. I don't think it was a massacre at all that was kept secret. What do you suppose if… Zuko had killed _one _man… who'd led the raids in the Southern Water tribe during Ozai's early years--"

"Yon Ra?" Dragon responded instantly, but with utter ridiculousness in his voice. "No… that man had long paid his respects to the Fire Nation. I wouldn't think he had any debt to pay for this new order with Fire Lord Zuko"

"Oh yeah he did," Syl said dangerously slow, staring at the computer's image like a moth to a lamp.

No bar-hopping night could've made him forget that one particular connection between Zuko and his best friend. Sylvester Matsko could feel his eyes beginning to glimmer with tears of joy, and discovery of pieces finally fitting in his head.

"See, back when he led the _Sea Raven_ raiders...Yon Ra was the ruthless vigilante in the South Pole; he didn't hesitate to kill off women and children just for being water-benders, as it was strictly ordered by Ozai to wipe out the benders for good. But the thing is… one of them slipped through his fingers.

"According to the text, he thought the last waterbender was Katara's mother, Kyna – or Kyosk - I _think_ that was her name?" Syl racked his brain for a second, but then dismissed that name-tracking and continued his story. "Back when she'd been captured by Yon Ra, she was a peasant woman from the tribes - something that Fire Lord Ozai would've easily overlooked. But Zuko… he took it personal."

"No joke?" Dragon's eyebrow rose again, marking a reference number on the edge of his computer image with the tablet pen. "He and Katara must've been very close by that point."

Syl snorted that ridiculous notion into a laugh.

"I guess you can say they'd _tolerated_ each other's existence prior to helping the Avatar fulfill his mission." Dr. Matsko sipped a bit of his lukewarm coffee, scratching his nose with the pen before writing some more. "I remember reading about this theory Kiely wrote, dealing with Fire Lord Zuko's psyche. It talked about how the '_sudden absence of his mother had left Zuko arrested in social, even romantic development. He lived a meaningful-yet-quiet life among the Council of Avatar Aang, and only married out of obligation to the throne'._"

Dragon did not need to look up to sense the bitterness in Syl's last words as he spoke about Kiely.

"God, what an asshole."

"I second that," the archaeologist took a sip out of his warm thermos. "So you also believe that this Fire Lord Zuko had it rough from the start?"

"Well, _who wouldn't?_" Syl exchanged perplexed looks with Dragon in the dim light, taking out a file of notes from his desk drawer. "I mean Zuko was only _seventeen _when he was crowned. He'd been banished for years prior to that, and… okay, he wasn't the most _social_ of the Fire Lord lineage… but he was _not alone_.

"Kiely discovered Fire Lady Ursa's tomb back in '97, and he claimed in his second book that Ursa and Zuko had reunited _'happily in the midst of his first ten years as Fire Lord'. _Zuko had practically raised himself out of a giant grave after he replaced Fire Lord Ozai, and I honestly think if he hadn't had so many good people at his side, he wouldn't have started the Fire Nation's golden age."

Flipping through a few loose pieces of paper in that manila folder file, Dr. Matsko pointed fiercly at exactly what he'd been looking for. A Xeroxed photograph.

"Wha'dya know," Syl beamed, returning his focus on the screen as he saw the markings of the real tomb match the ones on the photograph. "They're _Sea Ravens, _all right. I'm putting this as number 17-A, April 4th. Got that, Dragon?"

"Way ahead of you, boy," the older man had instantly opened up an _Excel _spreadsheet on his laptop, bringing in more light on his side of the room. To any other person, the spreadsheet would have looked like a laundry list of random dates, coordinates and trinkets… but to Dr. Chan's team, this document was more valuable than gold.

"It's beautiful, how that peasant girl chose to stay friends with Zuko," Dragon brought up, typing away on his keypad, "after all those differences they had with one another."

Sylvester Mastko snorted. "I take it you watched that _History Channel_ special, too?"

"_Famous Love Stories of Ancient China," _the man with grey hair mused behind his spectacles, and Syl just shook his head in disbelief.

"You know, those crazy _HC_ers will make anything into a romance just to boost the ratings…" Syl vented, putting away the file and returning his computer pen to the Wacom tablet. "They love to think Katara tolerated Zuko's bullshit because she secretly had a _thing_ for him."

"You're not that much of a Romantic, are you?" Dragon side-commented, keeping his eyes on the spreadsheet while Syl mouthed back mockingly.

"Let me set the record straight, Dr. Michel Dragon," Syl laughed at his own formality. "This guy, Zuko? He must've been the luckiest son-of-a-bitch for not getting _killed_ by that water peasant after he almost destroyed Avatar Aang. She was so fricken' _against_ the idea of trusting Prince Zuko when he finally wanted to play the good guy and help end the Hundred-Year War. My theory is she gave in only because Aang – God love him – _still trusted _the guy.

"But they would've easily lost touch after the war was over," Dragon pointed out in his usual under-toned manner. "If Katara did not want anything to do with this young man… why did she marry him?"

Syl took another sip of his coffee, as cold as it was now. "I kept pestering one of my professors about that, and _she_ couldn't give me a straight answer about why Katara tolerated him after the war. The only reason I could think of was because… they had a connection over their lost mothers.

"Ah yes, the famous search for Fire Lady Ursa," Dr. Dragon took a moment to recall that tale he'd investigated long ago. "Didn't she promise she would help Zuko find her, soon after he got crowned?"

"Yeah; it was just as Zuko had promised to help her find the _Sea Raven_ who killed Kyosk."

"Yon Ra."

"Yep. Zuko may've looked all stoic on the outside, but inside he was hurting over Lady Ursa's disappearance. I have a feeling he was emotionally taking Katara's loss as if it'd been his _own_ mother. Hell, _it's in the history books! _They set out on a mission to _find _Yon Ra together."

"It's funny you mention that. I was going through a few documents the other day about the Fire Navy, during Ozai's reign. One of them dealt with an unusual eye-witness account of two strangers attacking the Southern Raiders. Apparently, two dark spirits had invaded one of their ships on Whale Tale island and demanded to find the where-abouts of Yon Ra--"

"Zuko and Katara, hands-down."

"Wow."

"Yeah, and the thing is… they _did _find Yon Ra. But they didn't do anything."

"But why would they walk away from that so abruptly?"

The question bled through Syl's mind, and the possibilities seemed to appear one by one: _Katara was his best friend. She'd saved his life. They'd once gone on a hunt to find this man and kill him near the end of Aang's training as the Avatar, and done nothing. _

_But that's crazy, _the young man wondered, _Zuko and Katara were straight-shooters, and this was personal shit! They'd gone through hell and high-water to get to the Sea Ravens, only to accomplish nothing!? No... They would never just leave an obstacle hanging like that, unless they'd planned to finish it later... because something else had to be accomplished, first..._

And just as quickly, it hit Syl's head like a bolt of lightning to his temple.

"Aang."

_His training._

"He hadn't been fully realized as the Avatar."

* * *

**A/N - Hey everyone. Sorry I've been out of the loop for a while, but I've been abroad and had so many work-related projects going on the past couple months****! I'll be writing whenever I can despite my busy schedule, because this story is really intriguing me as much as it is you (maybe because I've been watching too many _DEXTER-_type of shows lately. Haha.)**. **Thanks for commenting, and stay tuned! --MM  
**


	4. Artifact B09, the Clay

"Alright, kiddos. Quiz time."

It was how the geologist greeted the interns that morning, wiping dirt off of her hands unceremoniously onto her army-camouflaged cargo pants as she held a mug of strong chai tea. The complete set of eight faces looked up to her meekly inside their vast laboratory tent…all _seven _of them… and it almost took Andrea by surprise.

"Remington!" She mused at the dark-haired boy sitting the back, "We won't have to drag you out of bed today?"

The other seven interns chuckled over to their lab partner in the back, holding his own head up by a backwards cap and Redbull can on his hand. His stomach grumbled loud enough to almost echo against the hard plastic floor.

"First Cubs game of the season," the tall, strawberry blonde girl with the tightest French braid managed to explain. "It aired at 3 in the morning here."

"Nice," Andrea laughed as she noticed her small radio-television now screening static in the very corner of the lab. "So… did you win?"

"We got_ pulverized!_" Remington almost fell off of his chair as he flailed his arms. "Those fricken' Yankees can't give us a break…"

As the kids erupted in laughter again, Andrea clapped their hands for attention. "Okay, let's not pick on the sleepy-head today – Ozzy, _I'm looking at you_ -" her eyes narrowed at the curvy, olive-skinned girl wearing the appropriate Yankees t-shirt, "and let's get back to business. Quiz time!"

The interns promptly sat themselves on the appropriate chairs labeled for them along the laboratory table in their tent. Each station of theirs had cleaning tubs, brushes, turkey baisters, and – in Remington's case – a few tin cans of energy drinks. The boy tossed them off into the garbage can at the edge of his table before Andrea spoke again.

In her hand she held a sealed plastic bag containing what looked like gray, clumped sand.

"Who can tell me the Brykean Dynasty standard ingredients to making a stable, clay pot?"

The small group of college kids started to turn heads at each other, meekly, while Ozzy immediately started flipping through a little notepad on her hand.

A long-haired, lanky boy with an over-sized _Metallica_ sweatshirt didn't even raise his hand as he mumbled. "Um... didn't it have a special kind of water? I think they had to get it from the volcanic baths to…um… bring the right moisture."

Andrea nodded, but after a brief pause, she gave the boy a less than amused face. "Mike, if you're going to attempt an answer, would you at least give me the _whole thing?_"

Mike kept to his comfort zone, his hair curtaining his cheekbones and his eyes returning to the floor. The geologist's eyes just darted away from the skinniest, most offbeat intern in the group, wondering how in the world he'd been the one to come here on scholarship.

"Come on, guys, _really._" She began to say, walking around with the same plastic bag of dried mud displayed on one hand. "I know we haven't covered these ceramic jewels in a week, but you're gonna have to jog your memory. This might give us the key as to why Zuk-"

"FOUND IT!" Ozzy's squeaking voice came in so high, Remington hunched. The girl was pointing to a page on her notepad. "You talked about it last Friday. _'steamed, purified water 1600 degrees Celcius, organic crystalline Earth with 40% nitrogen and 60% silicon – found in the southernmost coasts of China – and sub-zero glacier water for cooling process.'_

Andrea smirked. "Nice save, Ozzy."

It seemed to wake the interns up with a little laughter, and the geologist continued on her impromptu lesson.

"Now the interesting thing here is that any regular clay pot would begin to deteriorate after the first few hundred years, overwhelmed by the outer Earth that's compressing it."

Andrea managed to place some transparent rubber gloves on her free hand, holding her ziplock bag of ancient clay in place as she opened it and pinched a sample. The students responded by passing along the glove box one to the other, promptly putting them on as the small clumps of clay were examined loosely.

"But our lovely Chinese couple, Oma and Shu, found a recipe for making pots that would later make the ancient Romans and traditional Mayans turn in their graves thousands of years later," the geologist continued. "How do you think Oma and Shu were ahead of their time?"

Two sleep-deprived boys exchanged brief glances, but finally a hand was raised.

"We think they had a secret ingredient," a girl tugged on her blonde braid as she spoke shyly, but with certainty.

"Bingo, Shelley."

"I _knew _it! What'd we tell you…!" Ozzy gave Shelley a high-five, while Remington and the other boys grunted, and the girls began to chant something along the lines of "_No such thing as miracles. No fricken' way_!"

"Ladies, let's turn off the Girl-Power for a second and focus, please?" Andrea rolled her eyes and set the bag of clay down, sitting herself down on the stool. She noticed how Remington approached the dirt on his hand like a fascinatingly dead insect. "What's your take on the clay, Rem?"

The boy yelped as the intern behind him brought a little shove for attention, and he said, "It's…definitely dry… but it's granulated. And pure, like desert sand."

"Not your ordinary clay, right?" the geologist smirked, "The love birds obviously made their share of travelling to try and find this particular Earth-mending ingredient. What's impressive is that each sample we take of these pots leads us to believe that they had to travel further and further away to find the ingredient."

"That can only mean two things, Doc," Mike didn't bother raising his hand, while his other hand seemed to be preoccupied scratching his face. "Either this special ingredient was a natural phenomenon that had to be chased because of the weather… or it _moved_."

Ozzy just stared over at him, wondering if he was going to start laughing.

"Interesting theory, young Skywalker," Andrea placed her glasses on, picked up a pen and scribbled something on her moleskin notebook on the counter. "Now can you tell me what sort of ingredient was worth travelling for to make these time-defying clay pots."

Shelley and a handful of others said "lightning" while the same boy overthrew them by shouting out "_DRAGON's SALIVA!_"

"Mike, are you kidding me?" Ozzy smacked him. "Nobody needs to know about your latest World of Warcraft treasure salvage…"

"Actually, Oz, he's half-right," the geologist wavered a smirk that only her interns would see on the good days. Except this time, all the interns stared at her skeptically, as if in any moment she would say 'kidding!'

But she didn't.

"Wasn't it Dr. Emilio Suarez who theorized the existence of dragons in the Brykean Dynasty back in 1998?"

Shelley drew a small breath, while the rest of the group seemed to huddle themselves slightly together. It wasn't the fact that Andrea was all of a sudden taking a break from her usual matter-of-fact self behind those thin-rimmed glasses; it was because she had brought up Dr. Suarez's name.

The man who, for at least most young people of the West Coast archeological circle, was known as "Doctor Stupid" for leaving his internship with Dr. Kiely _just before_ they had dug up the ruins of Pyronea.

_Pyronea. _ Otherwise known as: _the Fire Nation._

"Yeah, but Suarez was a dope!" Ozzy exclaimed, folding her arms over her Yankees shirt. "He may as well have said Zeus was the pseudonym for King Henry VIII!"

"Trust me, I know," the older woman's cargo pants muffled noise as she moved back towards the rear of the lab tables, the interns following almost her every word. "But Doctor Stupid wasn't completely far from the truth here; for decades geologists have wondered how in the _world_ a cold, mountainous location like this could bring out such purified, brilliant minerals in their soil."

She gestured for the students to open up one of the tiny petri dishes situated in each of their stations and place a sample of clay onto it. Then she did it herself, placing a sample of clay under her giant microscope for investigation.

"In '69, my uncle scavenged this area, looking for dry fossils of young _pteradactyls_ from the Cretaceous period, and he stumbled upon not just one… but _seventeen_ separate egg remains of what looked like another flying dinosaur species. Only their wings were independent from their limbs… and according to my grandfather… were just a few million years too young to be related."

Andrea didn't hesitate to take out her dusty, worn leather wallet from one of her cargo pockets, managing to take out a single black-and-white photograph.

"Interestingly enough, everyone thought _he_ was crazy too."

There was a small intake of breath by each intern as the photograph was passed around the lab table, Ozzy not hesitating to whip out her glasses for further insight on the image. It was uncanny… a skeletal, distorted creature laying on what looked like a dug-up crater of soil… its entire body spanning to the size of a suburban house. Its coiling body structure mimicked a snake, except it was gigantic… with the evidence of wings that sprouted a quarter of its length down the spine.

When the photograph reached the last intern around the table, Andrea noticed how there were tears forming in his eyes, his hand shaking as it held the photograph. This intern - a plump, shaggy-haired boy named Charlie – had barely spoken since the start of their excavation term, but Andrea long concluded that he didn't have to say much to express how much he loved archaeology.

None of the kids had to ask why such a discovery like this hadn't made the cover of _TIME _or_ Newsweek_ that year, because it was clear. _1969. _The world had averted their eyes up into space to figure out what was going in that glowing gray circle of soil.

"My point is," Andrea continued as she accepted the photograph from Charlie, "Suarez had dug deeper into Kiely's findings after they'd investigated _Pyronea_ for flora and fauna. That kid wasn't an idiot all the time; he theorized the same thing about this purified soil, how it must've come from a source more powerful than lightning and had the animal-like agility to relocate whenever necessary. Kiely, being the sophisticated dick that he is, said he couldn't validate that without proof: _a real dragon_. So Suarez left the mission for Oakland."

The geologist replaced the photograph back into her wallet, and adjusted her microscope to study the clay. One by one, the interns followed suit.

"So you're saying Doctor Stupid claimed that, with the mixing of a dragon's saliva and its cosmopolitan temperature of fire," Remington spoke as if he were fighting a migraine, "it was possible to purify clay and keep it intact for centuries?"

"_Centuries upon centuries." _ Mike jumped in before their boss could get a word. He parted some of the greasy dark hair from his eyes. "It's the perfect situation! The purest water from the North, the most organic Earth on this side of the Eastern Hemisphere, and you make pots that'll last forever."

"I still think it was lightning," Another one of the boy interns muttered, mainly to the other boy intern that resembled each other so well, they may as well have been brothers. Andrea just threw an annoyed glance at them – Motoki and Kaname – the two boys who were very easily becoming a two-person band in this group and were very happy to keep it that way.

It was getting to the geologist's last nerve.

"Either way," Andrea started in a snapping tone as she reached for a lemon-juice dropper, "Oma and Shu had to make quite the number of pots to find themselves back into the Cave. Legend says that during their civil war, the two villages had to pick up and relocate constantly. Oma and Shu decided to reunite every year in the same Cave through the following of clay pots. Think _Hansel & Gretel. _

"They each made one clay pot in the course of one year, and they would plant the clay pot and slowly trek their way back into the others' arms, no matter how far or how distant their villages moved them. The reunion would only last for a day or two, and then they would have to return to their village to continue with the war and not reunite until another year passed. Romantic, eh?"

Andrea finally set her microscope aside to proceed to her laptop for further research and documentation, while the interns proceeded investigate a whole tray of soil samples in petri dishes under the microscope, as was their standard procedure in the mornings. The lab grew to its usual quiet state, and after about an hour, Shelley noted the first signs of sunlight as it filtered through the pair of circular shutter windows situated on opposing sides of the lab trailer. Andrea proceeded to shut the windows so as to not disturb the special dimming lights of laboratory.

"So, why do you think Fire Lord Zuko choose to be buried inthis cave?" Shelley asked the geologist as she passed by.

"I think that's been the sixty four thousand dollar question all week, hon."

"If you ask me," Mike started, his eyes still under his microscope, "he might have learned about this place based off of that legend. Maybe he wanted his burial with that peasant girl to be sacred or something. Like nobody would be able to find them."

"…Until now," the quiet Charlie corrected, jotting a sample description softly in his notebook.

"Wait a minute… _what about the Avatar?_" Shelley almost squeaked in her voice.  
"He found them."

"That doesn't count," Mike scoffed amusingly. "The Avatar isn't considered an _actual _human being. He's more like a demi-god who can seek his way into anything."

"You could be right; technically, the Avatar has every recollection of human soul buried in his very being. His mind, his body, his essence." Andrea was opening up a file on her laptop labeled _[Avatar Aang, Brykean]_ to back up her claim. "Inside, he had the ability to track any person in the human world, living or dead, according to how his emotional level was set. By the way he was resting near her tomb, I have a feeling Avatar Aang had a big soft spot for this water peasant girl. He just couldn't let her go."

"Yeah, trust me." Mike smiled and looked up from his microscope, directly to Shelley. "I've read _pleeenty _of old scrolls documenting their relationship… how he made her a necklace, how she constantly saved his life, and how they were witnessed kissing at this grand tea shop at the Earth Kingdom's capital city. That must've been right after the war ended."

"But how is it that both Zuko _and _Aang were able to track this Cave down?" Remington suddenly seemed to have found his second wind of energy that morning, challenging Mike to a knowledge boost.

"This is going to sound really crazy, but according to Suarez –_shut up—_" Mike noted the funny look that Remington was giving him and elbowed him for good measure. "-only a select few people were capable of taming dragons as their guides, and only _dragons _were the ones who could smell the saliva in the soil and track down any artifact that was made from them… including clay pots!"

"Man, if only Dragon were able to sniff saliva…" Ozzy joked, making the two-man band of Motoki and Kaname laugh almost to themselves.

"Hey, the two dragons," beamed Mike, skimming over his notes and comparing them to Remington's on his left. "Didn't Matsko mention something to Dr. Chen about Zuko and Aang being the last people to witness them?"

"Yeah, what's your point?" Remington was too enveloped in dissecting the bits of clay on his petri dish to even look over at Mike in the face.

"The war was over!" Mike pulled the greasy hair out of his face and looked over to Ozzy and Shelley to see if they would back him up. "The dragons were free to realm and procreate and have life-long tamers!"

Ozzy immediately knew where this was going, clamping a hand to Shelley in an excited way, "Who do you think might've gone back to be their guides?"

And that was when Andrea stopped her typing and just stared, perplexed at her laptop screen.

Instantly, Ozzy and Mike exchanged wide eyes and scrambled their way out their lab seats like five-year-olds, racing to the rear where Andrea was seated to see who would win the opportunity to ask that question to Dr. Vincent Matsko in person… _and be published for it_.

* * *

"I should head back home."

All heads turned towards the smallest girl, whose long black bangs hid her foggy green eyes from the world. Nobody had expected Toph to speak first, from amongst the round table in Iroh's tea shop, and it seemed to have taken the old man by surprise most of all.

From the short pause, Toph decided to explain herself further.

"Hey, you guys can do what you want, but _I'd_ like to try staying in one place for a decent amount of time," the girl kept staring at the same particular space on the table.

Katara exchanged a glance with Aang, holding his hand tightly under the table as she wondered about the runaway's newfound plan. "But… are you sure you want to go back, now? I mean, you heard Aang; we need to go search for the Earth King."

"We were thinking you could accompany Sokka and Suki to find him somewhere on the northern desert," the young fire lord took the liberty of explaining the plan further to Toph, but the look of her grimaced face, the plan did not seem to make her feel any better. "You'd be helping in the reform of the Earth Kingdom."

"Hmm, sounds like fun," Toph just muttered, laughing a little on the inside. Clearly, Zuko didn't understand what this little girl thought as her definition of 'fun,' and she felt even more emptiness, then, as she felt the presence of Mai clinging tightly to the Fire Lord's arm. "But seriously, thanks but no thanks."

Sokka just raised an eyebrow, wondering what in the world was up with her, now. He felt Suki begin to caress a comforting hand on his back. "Come on Toph, you're the best Earth-tracker we got!"

"Sure, but the Earth Kingdom is free again, and Haru even said he'd help. You guys can do without me." She gave the smallest hint of a smile to show she meant well. "Besides, I think my parents'll think I'm dead, or _disown_ me if I don't show up soon. And I don't want TwinkleToes here to get the blame because of me."

"Toph, are you really sure you want to do this?" Katara gave her motherly voice another try, as if speaking for both Aang and herself.

The little girl just shrugged, but already sensing an emptiness in her stomach begin to eat her from the inside. The fact that Suki's hand was still comforting Sokka's back didn't seem to be helping it, either.

"Guys, I'll be fine," her eyes were beginning to glimmer under her bangs. "I just need some time with my folks, okay? I can meet up with you later in the year, if you really miss me that badly..."

Aang's gray eyes just looked at Toph curiously, and then he glanced up at Katara who stood at his side, wondering if she could read the little girl any better. They both seemed clueless, as well as everyone else who looked over at her with so much weight in their concerned eyes. The young Avatar knew he had to take this pressure away from Toph now, before she'd start to feel even more sentimental – it's one of those things he knew she hated to show in public.

"Okay, well if you want… I can drop you off on the way to the Eastern Air Temple?"

"Sounds good."

"Alright, so then it's settled!" Sokka seemed to declare the laundry list of plans for the entire group. "Suki and I can head out to the desert to find the Earth King, Aang will go to the Eastern Air Temple to reconcile with the Guru, Katara will stay here to help clean up the Fire Nation mess, Zuko will head back to the Fire Nation to find the Council of Five and put those fire sages in their place, and Toph will go… home…"

"Yay, home," she said, and only Aang managed a laugh in response.

The conversations seemed to blur together after that, with Zuko and Iroh explaining the underground corruption of the Fire Sages they'll need to break in order to free the Council of Five, Sokka then asserting his collaboration with the Mechanist to make underground bunkers for refugees who may need safety from the former Fire Lord's anarchy, and Katara telling how the recent letters from their grandparents have made her believe the Water Tribes will soon be ready to help rebuild the Earth Kingdoms' villages.

Aang was the last to speak before Iroh, saying how now that he's a fully-realized Avatar, he would need the Eastern Air Temple Guru to teach him how to commune with this world and the Spirit World thoroughly. _Safely._ Perhaps it would better help him serve this newly reformed world if he now had the Guru as his permanent teacher, and Katara was the first to fully support that idea.

Everything seemed to be in its place, as Iroh overlooked the handful of people sitting around the table at his teashop. He was amazed at how articulate these young kids had become only from a year's journey through the world, and part of him was sad that his age could not partake in these dangerous new adventures that were written for them.

Instead, Iroh proclaimed to them that his tea shop would become the 'watering hole' of sorts, located in the Earth Kingdom capital city, for those men and women who would meet to follow the Avatar and the Fire Lords' cause. He stated that his leadership to the White Lotus would keep him occupied in arresting Earth Kingdom rebels throughout the villages… and tracking the unknown whereabouts of Long Feng and the recently-banished Dai Li.

And then something occurred to him, from within the web of chatter and laughter these kids were making. He noticed how that little girl he had met in the Earth forest just seemed to keep her comments and feelings to herself… staring at the same cup of tea that had long become lukewarm. Iroh regarded the closeness he could feel between Sokka and the female warrior at his side, the attachment seen from the dark, pale girl to his nephew… and the emotional, almost _spiritual_ bond he could already feel forming with that brave water tribe girl to the Avatar.

_The boy._

Iroh saw this, suddenly with the realization as to why that tough little Earth girl chose to stay quiet among her new family. The sadness in her eyes was intense, and yet she carried almost a permanent grin that told the world that for what it was worth, that boy had given her the friends she had always wanted.

_But why did she look so lonely?_

The old man held a soft sigh for the little girl. One that seemed as old as life itself as he remembered what it was like, once upon a time.

_Inside that vast labyrinth of humor, trouble, and frankness… Toph was finally becoming a teenager. _

_

* * *

_

**A/N - Sorry guys. I know it's been a while, but I'm officially in art school now and it's kicking my butt along with work commitments. I do plan to keep this story going, and hopefully it won't take that long for the next one. Trust me, it can only get more interesting. I DO plan to participate in NaNoWriMo this year, so I can't promise when the next chapter will pop up. I already have some great ideas in mind (especially with the original characters) and I greatly appreciate you reviews so far. It's motivating me to keep going.**


	5. Letter from Kiely

"Hey. We need to talk."

"_For the last time_, kiddo, I gave the publishing rights to Mike, and _that's final!"_

Syl had almost spilled the papers on his tiny research tent n paranoia, one of his bushy eyebrows already developing a twitch as he turned to see whoever had brought light into his work area.

When he saw that it was Grace, his shoulders softened, and he noticed that oddly-amused look in her eye.

"Let me guess." Dr. Chen bundled her jacket tightly from the evening cold as she came in. "Ozzy's still pestering you about that?"

Sylvester Matsko groaned, "Understatement of the fricken' year."

Grace laughed while she sat down behind her friend's phosphorescently-lit laboratory table, always getting a kick of how that man handled children. It was a _wonder_ how he managed to get that Stanford teaching assistant-ship for so many years without driving himself crazy.

Sylvester had spent the last four days trying to decipher and translate the markings on Fire Lord Zuko's tomb, with that impeccable passion to understand just how far this ancient royal had to challenge his moral principles in order to do the right thing. Syl had digitally developed his pictures of the tomb into black and white photographs and zoomed them to three hundred percent, printing them out as x-ray negatives for the best view of them possible over the light table. And they _still _looked like gibberish. The ancient Chinese writing of the Brykean Era had been notorious for being the most miniscule of the Dynasties, and Syl was on the verge of phoning his old professors and _compensate them_ for additional help on reading these documents.

Dr. Chen had been the one to say 'no' to that idea, considering how they didn't have enough funding to cover another full week of this so-called _OmaShu _expedition, much less bring in more people to this mess and promise them paychecks.

And she knew Syl well enough to know that he couldn't afford to pay top-notch Stanford anthropological linguists out of his own pocket.

"I think I can actually feel my eyeballs sinking into my sockets now, Grace," the man muttered frustratingly as he pressed his face to a magnifying glass over the table.

"You'll survive, stupid." Grace shook her head, knowing he was just in one of his intellectual '_no pain, no glory' _moods. "If you have a moment, I need you to look at this."

Sylvester was too enveloped in the photographs, he barely felt the three-folded piece of paper that Grace had poked into his forearm for attention. With a small sigh, he lifted the magnifying glass and looked at the paper.

It didn't seem like an artifact, especially when he opened it up and saw nothing but a standard 8.5 by 11 white sheet of printing paper staring back at him, type written.

Funny, but after three years digging into the ancient dead things, even _that _simple example of modern times would take Grace into a mental thrill ride. Sylvester took a moment to hold his breath as he read through the type-written material.

"I printed the email out this morning, and I was trying to figure out what exactly he was asking for—"

"Kiely emailed you this morning?" Syl wondered out loud, "He actually has time to do that in India?"

"Syl, be nice. I've been emailing him my findings about this Fire Nation tomb we found, and he's just asking us to do him a favor."

"Why are you keeping him updated about what _we find_, Grace?" the man couldn't hold his thoughts about it, especially with the tired bags under his eyes. "He's just going to take all the credit."

Grace scoffed. "We've been through this, Syl. Fire Lord Zuko's tomb isn't our responsibility! If we butter up our loyalty to Kiely at least for the next week while we're still here… he might… just _might_ return us a favor and fund our OmaShu expedition a bit longer. We're really close, Syl! I mean, the fact that Andrea and the interns just upheld a crazy theory about some clay pots lining up the tomb's location is _proof enough _that the Cave exists around here."

Sylvester Matsko narrowed his disappointed, baggy eyes to his colleague. "So, the Love Triangle; that doesn't spark your interest anymore?"

"As long as it finds a connection to Oma and Shu's possible tomb location, _yes."_ Grace's eyes looked pale, and very stressed with time. "We only have eight days left here, Syl. I'm trying to make them count."

In one small glance, Syl shook his head in exhaustion and disappointment over to Grace, not believing that she was stooping so low as a professional to actually _wait on Dr. Max Kiely's requests, _hand and foot. Just reading over the first few lines of his email, Syl could already feel the vomit coming to his throat, how self-righteous this middle-aged archaeologist was presenting himself through his writing.

_Salutations, Dr. Chen and Matsko._

_My deepest condolences on the failure of your search for the Cave of Oma Shu after such a lengthy, expensive expedition out there. I am currently speaking to you on a fast-train to Agra to make a quick trip to the Taj Mahal to seek out recollections of Lord Ozai that had been documented along the walls; I had recently developed a theory that the ancient gurus of the Brykean Era had resided there, and my instincts successfully told me that Ozai, while taken prisoner by his own son, had managed to annihilate all the living gurus while being imprisoned. I am hoping that this quick trip to Agra will be sufficient for me to track down evidence to Ozai's followers. _

_What I am writing to you about is, ironic to say, a letter._

_You see, I was investigating one of the underground bunkers in New Delhi - one of the places I had successfully regarded as a Brykean Fire Nation colony in my most recent book – and I had stumbled across an old letter made of what seemed rice paper… something that is not native to this side of the continent. The characters and the quality of the writing clearly marked it Brykean, and I had one of my professional colleagues decipher it immediately. We both agreed, by the content of it, it was a letter from Fire Lord Ozai to his daughter, Princess Azula… having me to successfully conclude that this very bunker was the asylum where she was held prisoner after the Great War._

_My reason for this letter goes like this:_

_While I have managed to translate and decipher the simple letter to its entirety, I am curious about the inner 'message' it may contain. The Fire Nation royals of the Brykean Era had been notorious for keeping codes within their writings to pass on information to loyal subjects, as you may have read from my second book, and I wish to know, Dr. Chen and Matsko, if this particular piece in the letter may strike a chord with either of you in your findings of Prince Zuko's tomb._

_The part of the letter I'm referring to is this (translated into English):_

_BE NOT AFRAID OF THE DESERT THAT SEPARATES US, LITTLE BIRD. _

_OUR ASHES WILL FALL PEACEFULLY, FROM GAO LING TO LAO GAI, TO THE SWAMPS OF THE SOUTH. _

_SOON, WE WILL BE HOME._

_I expect to receive a message from either of you by the end of the week of you findings, regardless._

_Best of luck,_

_Maximilian Kiely_

_Doctor of Philosophy – Early East Asian Civilizations_

_Thesis: "How the Fire Nation provoked the Disappearance of Elemental Bending during the Brykean Era." _

_Princeton University, '89_

_Master of Arts – East Asian Anthropology _

_Thesis: "The Rise, Fall, and Re-Emergence of the Fire Nation's economic welfare during the Brykean Era."_

_International University of Shang Hai, '86_

_Bachelor of Arts – East Asian Languages and Cultures, Ancient Chinese_

_Honors Thesis: "Colonial Progress of the Fire Nation in the Earth Kingdom during the Brykean Era."_

_Princeton University, '84_

Sylvester scrunched his nose in disgust as he concluded his reading of the letter.

"So, what do you think?" Grace asked, as her friend set the paper down. "Gripping?"

"Yeah," Sylvester's archaeological ego was gripping in sarcasm. "More like he wants to steal our thunder from this expedition."

"Come on Syl, focus," the young woman tied her hair with a ponytail and picked up the letter to skim through it once more. "He's asking for our help with this. Does the city of Gao Ling ring a bell to you at all?"

Sylvester placed his head to the table, racking his tired brain out for anything that connected to that city.

After a few minutes of resting his face on his hands, he murmured, "the only thing I can think of is the famous Explosions of Gao Ling. Fire bombs had been hidden inside the mountains around the time the Great War had ended, and I think Ozai's crazy followers annihilated most of the Earth Kingdom's oldest, most noble families."

"See, that's the first thing that popped in my mind, too," Grace admitted, nodding her head.

"Yeah… but I have _no idea_ why Ozai would risk mentioning a terrorist attack on a letter, especially to his daughter who couldn't do anything to help it."

In a way, Syl had the right idea; why would the Fire Lord go so far as to openly make a reference to a particular place that was bound to be filled with security after the Great War ended? Who was the Fire Lord _really _trying to get a hold of? Was he trying to get the Earth Kingdom's attention, simply? To say to them that even the most prominent families would be in danger without their loyalty to Ozai?

"Okay, this is gonna sound a little bit crazy," Grace's hands were gesturing out to her friend in nervous anticipation, "But would this have anything to do with that little Earth Bender who'd constantly travelled with them? Wasn't she from Gao Ling?"

"That's pretty unlikely," Sylvester thought, taking a sip of his lukewarm coffee mug all the way at the corner of the lab. "I mean I _do _remember reading about some little girl tagging along with the Avatar during his Earth Bending, but I don't think she ever had a name. In the old wanted posters, they just called her _The Runaway_ or _The Blind Bandit…_ because the girl was blind."

Grace reread Kiely's letter, trying to jog her memory's Earth Kingdom facts. "She taught the Avatar Earth Bending, we know that much. But I guess she just… wasn't that important to stick around."

Sylvester shrugged, going back to his magnifying glass, taking notes on the details of his findings. "Her name wasn't really mentioned that much by the end of the war. It's like she disappeared from the group or something. Maybe she went back to her parents and stayed hidden until she died, or just got killed in one of those crazy Ozai-vengeance battles. It's hard to say."

The girl shook her head in stress, breathing a calm second of air before she stood up again to head out.

"Okay, then," she said, stretching her muscles. "Could you just promise me you'll let me know if you find anything mentioning Gao Ling, or Swamps, or Lao Gai in those photographs?"

"Will do, boss," Sylvester smiled, not hiding the fact that he was long craving for a beer and a nap to change the pace inside that busy-bodied laboratory.

* * *

"Lunch time, Ozai."

Her voice was firm, without endearment.

She had held herself in a very straight stance while sliding the rice bowl through the cell that kept the former Fire Lord confined. Her uniform felt heavier and sharp just by looking at him: the man who had once ruled the entire Nation with an iron fist, without any remorse or space for compassion. Now, his eyes were drooped, fallen from anger, and his face was unshaven and messy.

It was strange, even then, to think that within the span of two months, she had been lucky enough to personally encounter the new Fire Lord, the former Fire Lord, and the former Fire Lord's brother… all in the same place. Things like this only happened to a prison guard once in a lifetime, and yet, the woman was not at all celebrating. Even by decree of the Fire Nation's new rule, she could no longer refer to this man sitting a few feet from her as 'your honor.'

Not that she was complaining about it, anyway.

Ozai took the rice bowl with the small reach of his fingers, his eyes focused on the ground as if trying to break through it. He didn't smile. He didn't even seem to acknowledge his breathing by the way he sternly looked at the ground under him. Slowly taking the chopsticks from the bowl, he dipped them into the rice and began to eat, grain by grain.

"You must be Ming."

The woman blinked, wondering how the man had gotten to learn the guards' names so quickly, but she kept her cool, nodding her head as an answer while she kept the empty tray in her hands.

"Rumors are that you were the last guard to see my brother incarcerated in this very same cell… before he escaped." Ozai began to turn his head towards the guard, oily strands of his hair blocking his face. "Is that true?"

Ming was calm throughout the entire move, however eerie it was. Through that one slit of a window he had in the cement space, she could tell he hadn't bothered to wash himself for days. Her nose scrunched from the stench, seeing Ozai's hair stick to his scalp unnaturally while he was beginning to study the woman's expression.

"That is true."

She had breathed calmness into her form while she said so. Ming knew that almost nothing would get past Ozai, even as a prisoner in his own royal cell, and she was ready to admit to the things that could no longer be helped.

"You do realize that…" Ozai's voice was quiet, like a whisper, "…by deliberately ignoring your duties and following a traitor's requests… this makes you a traitor to your country as well?"

"Not anymore, Ozai, but nice try," Ming responded automatically.

"I could've _hanged_ you, for what you did." The man kept pursuing her doubt.

"That is no longer your _concern _anymore, sir," Ming spoke flatly, but she felt the ends of her fingers turn numb as she still held the tray with her hands.

She was firm, yet curious… with just an inch of hesitation brewing more and more open with Ozai's eyes.

"What did my brother say to you?" he then asked, still picking his rice grains piece by piece. "What did he say… that got him to gain your trust, instead of _mine_?"

"I'm afraid he didn't gain it, Ozai. He _earned _it," Ming proclaimed with a steady voice. "He was a good man. He was kind. _Sincere._ He had my loyalty to the Fire Nation throne even after _you_ decided to change the rules."

"You sound so sure of yourself, even after my brother decided to pass on my responsibilities to a seventeen year old boy."

"Fire Lord Zuko is not a boy anymore, Ozai." Ming knew she was drawing a thin line between her job and her personal thoughts, but she didn't care. She had had enough of dealing with this man's scrutiny of others, regardless of the royal blood. "A _boy_ wouldn't have made each of us prison guards go through a re-evaluation process, to have our personal loyalties viewed and understood in front of the entire Peace Council to be sure that the former Fire Lord would be in… _fair care._"

As she spoke, Ming could feel a deep throb in her temple, remembering the handful of colleagues she had trained with, eaten with, exchanged practical banter with for _years _at the Azulon's Institute for National Security… fully reveal their disloyalty to the young Fire Lord Zuko, choosing to be exiled rather than to follow a boy's idea of international unity.

She couldn't understand why people found it difficult to accept defeat, especially when it was for the better. Ming had not been raised to comply with such oppression as her friends had eventually chosen to show to the Peace Council, hearing things like "_you're a FOOL to degrade our nation like this!"_ and "_The Phoenix King will rise again. I won't put my life's work into the hands of CHILDREN."_

True, it seemed a joke to follow the wisdom of a lost Avatar and a banished prince to reconstruct such a fallen world… but Ming's instincts never failed her. Perhaps it was those short conversations she'd had with Iroh, those days she had had the privilege to feed him and talk about an elementally-balanced world. She wanted to believe what everyone else was saying, that world peace at this point would be next to impossible, but Ming didn't flinch. She trusted that Iroh's words were the right ones, and if that meant keeping constant vigilance to a sick, power hungry prisoner… so be it.

"Your son is a great leader. It's not my place to tell you how I feel, Ozai," Ming said, her hands now clenching the tray like she would snap it in two, "but not everybody thinks the way you do. _Especially _in here."

"Pity."

That small muttering of a word almost hit Ming's last nerve, and she would've attacked the man right then and there. But she knew better. She'd been trained for the better.

Ozai placed his chopsticks aside, not having to guess that Ming was now getting impatient with his slow eating habit, and scooped up the rest of the rice grains with one hand to finish. Ming looked disgusted, and inevitably, she felt an edge of sadness for the sick, ferociously-twisted man who wouldn't change.

As Ming received the empty bowl from the cell slot, Ozai's voice changed, and he averted his eyes from the prison guard to get his words right. His shoulders and arms caved inward as he spoke.

"How is my daughter?"

Ming winced.

"Last I heard… she is doing fine."

'Fine' meant that she was not struggling as much as she usually did with the chains, her body held up like an 'X' in the Fire Nation asylum far away, at the southern tips of the Earth Kingdom, under constant surveillance by guards much bigger than Ming. 'Fine' meant that Azula was finally eating, drinking, not letting the passage of time leave her like a thin, helpless child. 'Fine' meant that she wasn't trying to drown herself in her daily bath, or losing her voice from all the screaming and cursing at the guards for being fools, _traitors_ for not setting her free.

Azula had slipped. Ozai knew it. And now, more than anything… he wanted her back.

He wanted to tell her that everything was going to be okay, to not be afraid of these monsters keeping her locked up and chained. He wanted her to know that someday, things would be better for them.

Ozai raised his head once more towards Ming, his eyes heavy and sad.

"Tell the warden… I would like to write a letter to my daughter."

Ming raised a curious brow.

"But—"

"It's the Fire Nation policy, isn't it? All prisoners get to exchange a letter to someone?"

Ozai knew that rule, as he had witnessed his own father add that policy to the Fire Nation security for the sake of gathering internal information between prisoners and possible plots against the royal family.

And he doubted that Zuko would've been smart enough to eliminate that policy so early in his reign.

Ming hesitated, jogging her memory for that policy. She kept a stern voice as she answered.

"Yes, all prisoners can exchange a letter," she looked at his features, all weak and aging, "But you do realize that the letter may be analyzed and documented by the Security Council before delivery?"

"I know."

Ming still looked puzzled, but she nodded.

"I'll see what I can do."

And from there, Ozai moved his frame towards the wall, most of his back now facing the guard.

He could hear her rough footsteps leave the cell without another word, then, the door clicking locked behind her.

It took him a few minutes to feel himself breathe again, but Ozai rested against the wall, smiling.

_Bending was irrelevant._

There had been a hint of glistening in prison guard's eyes, so miniscule that he had barely noticed it. What he noticed more, though, was the fact that he had struck a chord on the woman's nerve. She had become vulnerable – even if it was for a _fraction _of a second – and Ozai knew that if he was patient, he could eventually get what he wanted from anyone.

There was a time, after all, when he was the most powerful figure in the world.

He just had to go along with this 'lowly prisoner' act, for a while.

* * *

Toph held onto her headband tightly from the gushing winds, her eyes shut tightly while sitting along Appa's saddle, homeward bound. Aang was steering way in the front on Appa's neck. For some strange reason, it felt so awkward for the girl, being just the two of them in the air… no Sokka to push around over corny jokes, no Zuko to tease and lighten up, and… no Sugar Queen.

For the first time since she had met Twinkle Toes, Toph didn't want to be alone with Aang. She felt… uncomfortable about it, especially knowing that within all of those new moments she could 'see' going on between him and Sugar Queen, there was no intention anyone else in the boy's life.

She had seen that moment coming. She'd felt the way their heartbeats quickened whenever they exchanged two words to each other, and how quiet they would get in the middle of any bickering. Toph saw Katara's absolute loyalty to the boy since they'd first been introduced way back at Earth Rumble Six… how the water girl refused to leave the arena without the boy, no question.

All these months, Toph hadn't thought about Twinkle Toes other than just a kid she could tease. She remembered picking on him during his Earthbending training, putting him in dangerous tasks mostly for the sake of amusement on her end. She had fun with him; she enjoyed those days when they would just sneak out and cause trouble, regardless of what Katara would pester them about. As much fun as she had with Aang, the girl had kept her distance every time, because she _knew_ she wasn't supposed to be in the picture. It was always going to be Aang and Katara. Katara, and Aang.

And here he was, the newly-appointed Master of All the Elements, the wisest and most important person in the entire world right now… taking the liberty of escorting the Earthbender back to her parents like a lost little moose-lion cub.

Time had passed so quickly from her noble town of Gaoling, to the incessant Earth Kingdom Desert, to the overwhelming Ba Sing Se… and all their undercover antics while in the Fire Nation. Then came the days of the Eclipse, how the two of them had managed to take on Azula just fine without Katara present. Toph could still remember that adrenaline rush… wanting to infiltrate that bunker and help him take down the Fire Lord once and for all.

She wanted to _prove_ that she had more than Sugar Queen's sweetness could offer. Toph would've given anything to show how her skills as a lie-detector, a fun-seeker, and a rough-nut would be more worthy of Aang's affections. Now all of a sudden, she couldn't help but remember that small moment Aang and Katara shared at the Jasmine Dragon… and the little girl couldn't have felt any less pretty.

_Ugh, WHY am I still thinking like this! _Toph shook her head sadness, shutting her eyes tightly as Appa groaned over the harsh winds.

_WAKE UP, you stupid girl…_ she said to herself, feeling her hands cover a bit of her face.

_It's over. He's TAKEN. This might be the last time we get to hang out as friends before he goes off and plays Avatar… and ALL I'M DOING is moping and groaning about-_

"I didn't think you wanted to go home so quickly!" Aang shouted over the harsh wind, trying to get his friend to talk. "What's the deal?"

Her thoughts had been so loud in her head, Toph almost flinched off the saddle when she heard his voice.

Immediately, she slouched herself indifferently in a sitting position, picking her toes.

"I dunno," Toph answered as a form of habit, "I figured that my work here was done, you know?"

"What?" the boy turned his head slightly to acknowledge her, "what do you mean 'work?'"

"_I mean, _Twinkle Toes," she moved herself to the front of the saddle for better earshot, "that I pretty much taught you everything you needed to know about Earthbending. That was the deal, wasn't it?

Aang rose his eyelids, not really knowing where this edge of sarcasm was coming from. Was she angry at him over something? The boy couldn't tell.

Still, Toph continued to explain.

"Don't get me wrong, you guys are great, but I figured you were… you know, _done with me_."

"Um," Aang glanced briefly at Appa, confused. "Toph what are you talking abou—"

"I'm _not_ gonna pretend that you guys all secretly think I'm as irritating as a Boar-Kupine, okay?"

The boy looked back at her, stupefied. "Whoa, Toph, _I never said-"_

Toph could feel her hands clenching to the saddle.

"Plus, you guys have all these amazing plans set up for the start of the New World, and here I am, absolutely _clueless_ as to what to do now. It's like I don't have a choice except to go back to my parents and go back to pretending that I'm this helpless little girl and…_!"_

"_Okay, STOP. TIME. OUT!"_

Aang barely felt those words come out of his mouth as he jerked Appa's horns into a sloppy _halt _in the air. Appa groaned vocally in annoyance. Toph made a little scream as the whole saddle tilted forward slightly, and she held onto the saddle like a child. A child she was practically turning back into, from that horrible ranting.

Still panting from that immediate halting he'd done to his bison, Aang turned back to his friend and asked sternly, "Toph, what is going on?"

_Don't say it, _she thought fiercely to herself, shaking her head. _Don't tell him. It's too late. It's over._

"Toph?"

Aang noticed how the little girl kept shaking her head, as if wanting some sort of thought to go away. To not exist, or even be acknowledged as something that had occurred to her. Aang remembered that gesture quite well… back in the Earth Kingdom Desert, when the Library had sunk, and he had asked her what had happened to Appa.

A cold shiver ran through the boy's mind, then, and he absentmindedly petted Appa's fur while his focus remained on Toph.

She was now hugging her legs, her head facing the distant air as if refusing to say another word. Her hair was covering her eyes almost completely, thankful that that boy couldn't see the sadness in them.

"Okay, fine. I'll talk," Aang rested the steering rope on Appa's horns, and turned his full body and attention to the stubborn little girl. "Toph, really… _I really have no idea where you're getting that…_ but there's a lot… a _TON of things _that the world can still do with you. Sokka begged for you to go out looking for the Earth King, and maybe you could help the Earth King bring down the Dai Li. You can help teach Earth Bending to the kids in the Fire Nation colonies! I'll bet they haven't even seen a real Earth Bender in a while… and you're the best teacher I've ever had! And what about Sand-Bending? _METAL-BENDING!"_

Aang threw his hands up and held them over his head, overwhelmed just by what he was saying. With a small smile, the girl chuckled over the sound of the boy's flabbergasted voice. It took a small second for him to draw another breath and finish what he was saying.

"Toph, I don't think I ever got the chance to tell you…" his voice was a bit quieter, and Toph's eyes were rising a bit from curiosity, "…but that last Earth-bending move I did against Ozai? It saved my life."

"Huh?" her voice was off, hiding the blush from her cheeks. "What move?"

"I was seeing with my feet, and Ozai attacked me from behind." Aang looked elsewhere, trying to erase the memories of those last few minutes of battle, and the pain. "I back-kicked an Earth rumble into his hand. If it hadn't been for you, I probably wouldn't have made it."

Toph let her eyebrows rise in astonishment from the news, looking over the saddle to Aang's general direction, over to where she could hear his voice.

"Point is," Aang settled himself back to take the ropes on Appa. "You don't have to stay with your parents forever. I don't think you know how much the world needs you."

She didn't let the smile show itself as she let those words sink in, but Aang was already facing the open sky ahead of him, steering Appa with a '_yip yip!_' and letting the wind pick up again.

"Do _you_ still need me?"

It was a question lingering her mind for the entirety of that whole conversation, and Toph's voice got soft and fragile as she let it out for Aang to hear.

The boy didn't seem to think too deeply about it, and he looked over his shoulder to his Earth-Bending friend while she let the breeze play with her dark hair.

"Of course I need you," he said with a smile, as if it were the most obvious fact. "I'll always need you."

And Toph felt the insides of her get warm and tingly, like a bunch of tiny cave-critters had just made a home there. She smiled to herself, and to nothing in particular while she said, "Cool."

She knew that he probably hadn't meant anything deeper than 'friend' or even just 'Earth Bending teacher' by what he had said, but in that moment, Toph didn't care. She was happy with the thoughts running through her mind, the _idea_ that in some strange twist of fate, there could _still be a chance that… _

…_maybe… _

…_someday… they would… _

"Then I'll just go sleep on it at home for a couple weeks, come up with a new plan," Toph snorted back into her regular self. "I'm fricken' _exhausted _of all this traveling, aren't you?"

And she felt blessed to hear her friend's laughter, then, like in spite of his Avatar status… a part of him would always be the care-free boy. The boy who had rescued her from that fancy, sheltered life.

* * *

**A/N - Aaaand, we're back! Oy oy oy. I should just stop making insane promises about chapter updates, especially when it takes me over a year to do one! Anyway... no, I'm not dead, and I still have a great plan for where I want this story to go! As you may have guessed by now, the whole Kataang canon is not really going to be involved in this one, which will make the writing of it much more interesting! Let me know what you think. And thanks for continuing to be - ahem - LOYAL to my work! -SM**


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